Bitter End
by QueenOfGeeks
Summary: Let's raise a glass to the bitter end... GSR


**Bitter End**

**Author:** QueenOfGeeks

**Rating:** M

**Pairing:** GSR

**A/N:** OK, I have serious money that I am the least regular updater on the face of the earth. But this one just seemed to flow off my fingers and onto the screen. Yes, it's completely OOC, and yes, I know it will never happen, and yes, I know that underneath it all I truly am a GSR fan. Just work with me here -- I'm exercising artistic license, I think.

* * *

A smoky, dingy bar on the outskirts of a town littered with neon lights and fallen stars. Mediocre band strumming away a Gm7 chord to a honky-tonk ballad they forget the words to. Warm beer in hot glasses, and vodka and bourbon on rocks that wouldn't have even scratched the paint on the Titanic.

This isn't goodbye. They weren't ready to say goodbye. Not yet.

He promised all those blue moons ago to never leave her without explaining first, and it's the one promise he managed to keep. Or it would have been, if he were telling the truth. He blamed it on the job, on the stress of keeping a personal and a private life separate and yet together in a world where the line between real and not-real was as static as water over Niagara Falls.

But he lied. And so did she.

She blamed it on her past, on her inability to get over her trauma as a child, and as a college student, and as a CSI. It wasn't her fault, it was the fault of the society that formed her and her morals and her drives. And so the blame gets passed around.

But they both see the lies as the empty words of comfort they really are. He's leaving because he fell for yet another student, in what has become a pattern so ingrained in his psyche that even though he cheated on her at nearly every seminar he taught, he can't stop himself because he knows he met her that way, and that the old spark may just light in a new set of brown eyes.

And she's no better in her pursuit of her own 'peace'. She fell sideways into the lure of the bottom of a bottle, and some nights she lies back with the bottle and the gun she's pulled on countless suspects, and just thinks about the right to life and lack thereof. She knew she needed help, knew how to get it, knew she could turn to others if it all became too much, but she didn't. She listened to the call of Jack and José and Jim and the Captain, who shouted too loudly for her to hear anything else.

And they both lost everything.

Jobs, friends, futures, lives. It was all gone like the flash of lightning in a summer heat wave. Temperature and passion and a flare of life, and then back to the sweat and exhaustion of the real world. He was going to a new life in a new city, with someone else to keep his bed warm and his laundry clean. Another ex-student, another job, another lifetime to live until he bored of it and started again from scratch and whiskey. She decided that her home was back in Boston, among the bars and the teachers and the cold stone halls of the school that started the problem. An apartment, a well-stocked alcohol cupboard, and a bed were all she required to live off of, and she was determined to move on without him.

Their friends shook their heads and murmured about the loss of two bright stars in the field. About burning out, and about workplace romance, never mind that the ringleader and her right-hand man were engaged in a steamy office affair themselves. And they remembered all the good the two investigators had done before they were lost to the pull of the heat and flame and passion and figuring out how to live without involving the heart. The friends each watched their own mental montage of the 'good old days', whenever those were, and the victims and the perps and the ones who were both, and the ones who were saved and the ones that got sacrificed to The Cause. And they shook their heads and murmured some more and left their thoughts at the door because he always told them that a crime scene was no place for temporary distractions.

A dingy, smoky bar off the Strip, with neon lights and fallen stars lining their own personal pathway to Hell. A beer, or two or three or more, and vodka and whiskey and the rest of the alcohol supply cleaned out by the patrons who only cared about the quantity instead of the quality of their liquor. A mediocre band forgetting the words to cheesy overdone lyrics about heartbreak and loss and pain that the rich and famous could afford to buy off.

This isn't goodbye, because it can't be. It's the bitter end of two crossed paths that never said a proper hello in the first place.

* * *

_Farewell to old friends_

_Let's raise a glass to the bitter end_

_Farewell to old friends_

_Will you be the same when we see you again_

_Bitter End – Dixie Chicks_


End file.
